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My name is Donna Hegelson and I’m an assistant professor here at Johnson County Community
College in the Mathematics Division. I was asked to tell you why I like working here.
The reason I like working here the most is in comparison to where I’ve taught other
places. In other places I feel as a teacher that sometimes you feel like you’re marooned
on a desert island, and your students are brought to you on a ferry each day, and then
they leave your classroom and you’re in your classroom all day long marooned, alone,
by yourself. Whereas here, it’s a lot different. You have a lot of support, a lot of systems
in place to help you be successful, help your students be successful. For me, as a math
professor, what I liked the most is the Math Resource Center. So if my students should
happened to miss class for reasons they can control or not control, they can go to the
Math Resource Center and they have free tutors that their tuition paid for that will help
them get caught up in class. They can also come see me, but it’s nice when they can
have someplace else to go if our hours don’t work out for them to come see me. If I have
a student who has to make up a test or has special accommodations needed to take a test,
they can go to the Testing Center to take the test. That’s a system that has been
put in place that makes my job so much easier than when I taught high school and I had to
figure out a way to have them come after school and stay and take a test with me. But the
other reason I really like working here is I really like our students. We have a variety
of students at this institution – some are developmental students who are coming and
taking classes that some other students coming to us had in high school. It’s really great
when you can have a developmental student that had a really bad math history and you
can get that turned around for them. They can get to where they like math now. If they
don’t like it, they can tolerate it. That’s really exciting. But also, in this economy,
we have a lot of students that come here ready to be university-bound students that are just
coming here because our tuition is quite a bit cheaper than the nearby universities.
So they are able to take the classes they need over their first year or two of a four-year
degree, and they can get it here a lot cheaper, and they like the fact that our classes are
a lot, lot smaller than, for instance, the university that’s just down the road. That’s
the two main reasons I like working here the most – the systems that are in place and
I really like my students.